Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, April 20, 1999

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"Spaced Out: Late 1990s Works From the Vicki and Kent Logan Collection,'' at the California College of Arts and Crafts, commemorates the opening of the Kent and Vicki Logan Center Chronicle Photo by Deanne Fitzmaurice less

"Spaced Out: Late 1990s Works From the Vicki and Kent Logan Collection,'' at the California College of Arts and Crafts, commemorates the opening of the Kent and Vicki Logan Center Chronicle Photo by Deanne ... more

"Spaced Out: Late 1990s Works From the Vicki and Kent Logan Collection,'' at the California College of Arts and Crafts, commemorates the opening of the Kent and Vicki Logan Center. Chronicle Photo by Deanne Fitzmaurice less

"Spaced Out: Late 1990s Works From the Vicki and Kent Logan Collection,'' at the California College of Arts and Crafts, commemorates the opening of the Kent and Vicki Logan Center. Chronicle Photo by Deanne ... more

A new destination has just been added to the cultural map of San Francisco: the Kent and Vicki Logan Center galleries at the California College of Arts and Crafts' newly completed Montgomery Campus.

The mix of inaugural shows hints that unpredictability may be the mark of CCAC's expanded exhibition program: contemporary art from the Logans' collection, a display of urban design ideas by four radical Dutch architecture groups and a loopy mixed-media installation by French artist Fabrice Hybert.

The shows also signal the presence of a new player on the San Francisco exhibition scene: Lawrence Rinder, director of the CCAC Institute for exhibitions and public programs. Rinder had a distinguished track record as curator of 20th century art at the Berkeley Art Museum.

The CCAC facility is a vast shed of a building near the foot of Potrero Hill, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, built as a bus terminal in 1951 and handsomely renovated by two teams of San Francisco architects. The south portion of the complex has been in use since 1996. The opening shows in the new galleries mark the facility's completion.

The Eighth Street entrance of the Logan Center, the institution's public area, terminates a long central channel of inverted steel V's that give the building's roof ridge seismic stability. Flanking the central space, mostly closed to the public, are studio spaces for painters and graduate students in architecture.

The white enamel and the half-open glass ceiling of the Logan Center's atrium give it a Southern Californian look. But glimpses of city-scape afforded by the main building's clerestory windows are unmistakably San Francisco.

On the north side of the Logan Center is the two-story gallery. On the south side will be a cafe.

The first-floor exhibition space is divided into two long rooms. On one side is "Spaced Out: Late 1990s Works From the Vicki and Kent Logan Collection." On the other is "Big Soft Orange," the Dutch urban design show.

Like every other local show of things collected by the Logans -- and there have been many in the past two years -- this one is both striking and dramatically uneven.

SHALLOW THEATRICALITY

The figurative expressionism the Logans favor turns theatrical and manipulative in the hands of most artists who practice it.

Even a piece such as Liza May Post's "Shelter" (1996), which is arresting at first, cannot hold the eye or mind for long. "Shelter" is a large color photograph of a man and woman apparently grappling with each other against a paneled background that might be an office wall. The man's lifted right arm appears to have a stuffed sleeve branching from it. On her right hand the woman wears something that might be a mitten or a cast.

These ambiguities are involving until we realize that nothing lies behind them but contrivance.

Similarly, the Francis Bacon-style vagueness of Nicola Tyson's painting "Figure With Stripes" (1996) is all design and no discovery. Its emotional payoff is cookie-cutter anomie. Marc Quinn's floor array of blown glass -- which looks like body fragments coalescing from blobs of mercury -- is marvelous until we recognize its source in the fluid metal android of "Terminator 2."

Fabrice Hybert's rambunctious installation "At Your Own Risk," occupying the whole second floor, at least has anarchy and energy on its side. One hundred video monitors, each with its own tape loop, line the room just above eye level. Walking around to watch them is tricky because the floor is littered, and the walls hung, with absurd objects that served as props in the taped performances.

PROPS AND SKITS

There is a six-fingered glove, a narcissist's diving mask -- mirrored on the inside -- a crutch fitted with an outrigger mirror for looking up skirts, an inflatable transparent bear suit, a prosthetic finger and much, much more.

Transfigurations of gender, age, ability and what usually passes for sanity are the themes of most of Hybert's skits. Performances by drag master Etiane Pine Carrington are what put many of them over the top.

Thinking about "At Your Own Risk" is strictly optional. Enjoying some part of it is a sure thing for anyone with a sense of humor. To Hybert's credit, he understands that theatricality serves only to dissolve definitions of art and life, and only when it overflows with irony.

"Big Soft Orange" is hard to read for visitors unacquainted with the visual language of urban design. Are we supposed to find it hard to tell where one urban planner's proposal ends and another's begins?

The models glowing under black light are the most appealing things here, but they barely insinuate the populist, market-friendly attitudes that make the proposals on view seem radical in the Netherlands.

What will hold people here is the electronic music score the designers commissioned to accompany their show.

A NEW ART SPACE

SPACED OUT: LATE 1990S WORKS FROM THE VICKI AND KENT LOGAN COLLECTION: Paintings and sculpture. Through June 5.

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